Think back to your experience as a new faculty member. If
you conjure up mainly memories of a happy time of exciting new opportunities
suddenly open to you—-new colleagueships, new intellectual challenges, etc.-
it’s probably been quite a while since you were a new faculty member.

If you think a little more about it, you may start to recall
the hurdles you had to jump over to start a research program—-writing proposals
and trying to get them funded, attracting and learning how to deal with
graduate students, and having to churn out a large number of refereed papers
while you were still trying to figure out how to do research. You may remember
the incredibly time-consuming labor of planning and teaching new courses and
the headaches of dealing with bored classes and poor student performance and
possibly cheating and poor ratings and a host of other problems you never
thought about when you were a student. And you may recall sitting through
endless departmental faculty and committee meetings, wondering how you could
manage to squeeze in some time for your family and yourself on top of
everything else you had to do. Learning to cope with all those conflicting
demands on your time and energy was probably not a fun-filled experience for
you. Few faculty members ever receive guidance on how to be a faculty member,
and it can take years to figure it out by trial-and-error.

Entry into the profession is if anything harder now than it
used to be. Even institutions that historically emphasized undergraduate
education are pushing their new faculty members to build strong funding and
publication records in their first three years, and most institutions still do
little or nothing to help the newcomers make the transition from graduate
student to assistant professor. The stress on the new faculty members can be
debilitating, and those who survive often do so at a severe cost to their
personal relationships and/or health.

Robert Boice, head of a faculty teaching center at
SUNY– Stony Brook, has spent many years studying faculty members in their first
3-4 years and has summarized his observations in The New Faculty
Member.1 This column outlines some of his main
points.

Common characteristics of the typical new faculty members
Boice observed are that they

spent far less time on scholarly writing (proposals and papers) than was
needed to meet promotion and tenure criteria for their institutions.

admitted to going to class overprepared (with more material than they could
reasonably cover in the allotted time) and rushing to complete everything,
often at the expense of active student participation. Many spent nearly 30
hours per week on class preparation.

taught defensively, doing whatever they could to avoid student complaints.
They were primarily concerned that students would complain about content
errors.

received student evaluations that fell well below their expectations and
blamed the results on external factors (invalid rating systems, poor students,
unfavorable class times and sizes).

experienced a sense of loneliness and lack of collegial acceptance, and had
difficulty establishing productive contacts with colleagues who could provide
guidance and support.

Not all new faculty members fit this description. Boice
identified 5–9% of new faculty as "quick starters," who in their
first 2-3 years turned out enough proposals and papers to put them in fine
shape for promotion and tenure. They also scored in the top quartile of peer
and student ratings of teaching and self-ratings of their enjoyment and comfort
levels as teachers. Unlike the majority of their colleagues, the quick
starters

spent three hours or more per week on scholarly writing.

integrated their research into their undergraduate classes.

did not spend major amounts of time on course preparation (after their
first semester, they averaged 1–1.5 hours of preparation per lecture
hour).

lectured at a pace that allowed for active student participation.

regularly sought advice from colleagues, averaging four hours a week on
discussions of research and teaching.

The main differences between typical new faculty and quick
starters are the latter group’s abilities to balance conflicting demands on
their time and to quickly establish productive networking with colleagues.
Boice has developed a "balance program" to help new faculty members
do those things. Participants in the program commit to these guidelines:

Limit classroom preparation to a maximum of two hours
per hour of lecture. This target is extremely difficult for many
professors, but those who manage to reach it find that they can still cover
what they want to cover, appear more relaxed to their students, and are better
able to maintain a pace that encourages active student involvement in class.

Spend 30-60 minutes a day on scholarly writing.
New faculty often feel they must have long unbroken stretches of time to
write, but the demands of an academic career seldom allow this luxury. Writing
for a set time daily leads to steady productivity and fewer feelings of anxiety
over failure to meet scholarly productivity expectations.

Spend at least 2 hours a week on discussions with
colleagues focused on teaching and research. (Periodic meetings over lunch
are convenient for such networking.) It is difficult for most new faculty
members to meet this commitment, but doing so pays big dividends. Good
contacts provide ideas and sometimes tangible assistance in getting a research
program off the ground and/or improving teaching success.

Keep daily records of work time expenditure.
Recording helps new faculty self-monitor how well they are meeting
Commitments 1–3.

Integrate research interests into lectures.
Doing so leads to greater enthusiasm for teaching as well as recruitment of
students as research assistants.

Boice found that faculty going through this program
initially resisted its requirements, particularly the one about limiting
lecture preparation time, but after five weeks they began to look and feel more
like quick starters. Regular meetings with a facilitator or mentor were
instrumental in helping them stay with the program. Once they attained the
standards set out in the plan, they reported greater efficiency and a higher
level of comfort in their teaching.

The New Faculty Member offers a variety of useful
suggestions for supporting new faculty. We recommend it to administrators,
mentors, faculty developers, and anyone else concerned with helping new faculty
members attain the levels of research productivity and teaching skill for which
their potential was recognized when they were hired.